2026 Writers Discussion Series
Jaha Nailah Avery (UNC Law ’13), Lawyer, author and reporter
March 26 | 3:30 PM | Stone Center
Talk title: Oral History as Liberation Practice
Abstract: To share a story is not a neutral act. Oral history isn’t just documentation, but resistance. It’s a living, political practice that challenges erasure, confronts institutional memory, and redistributes narrative power. Within Black communities, oral history has long preserved knowledge systems, safeguarded lived experience, and contested dominant historical accounts that marginalize or distort community truth. Drawing from community-based oral history work, and the history of “The Grapevine,” this presentation considers how interviews can operate as sites of solidarity, and testimony can function as both healing and organizing. At a moment when histories are being contested, banned, and rewritten, oral history offers a powerful mode of preservation, a strategy for survival, a method of political education, and a tool for collective power-building.
Jaha Nailah Avery is an African American woman and proud Southerner. Hailing from Asheville, North Carolina, she received her law degree from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studied constitutional and civil rights law. She spent several years in the startup tech space before embarking on her professional writing career, and her work can be found in Essence Magazine, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, and more. Her aim is to always document, celebrate, and preserve the stories of Black people, communities, and history. In her first book, Those Who Saw The Sun, she interviewed survivors of Jim Crow and compiled their accounts together in one collection. Her second book, I Heard, is an illustrated poem spanning over 400 years of Black history. She recently wrapped production on a season of an investigative podcast (Threshold) focusing on the history of Cancer Alley outside New Orleans, which releases in spring 2026.
Register Now: https://go.unc.edu/Jaha